WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:05.000 All right, next up, next up is Ben Hibben. 00:05.000 --> 00:11.000 His talk, Tips for Designing and Teaching Soldering Kits for Beginners. 00:11.000 --> 00:17.000 Blenster, as we should know him, has been teaching soldering to beginners for over eight years, 00:17.000 --> 00:22.000 not satisfied with the variety of existing kits he used at different events. 00:22.000 --> 00:29.000 He came up with the hat to start creating kits designed to be easy for beginners to work with. 00:29.000 --> 00:35.000 Together, they have been taught many hundreds of students at dozens of events over the years. 00:35.000 --> 00:37.000 Please welcome Ben. 00:37.000 --> 00:42.000 Thank you very much for having me. 00:42.000 --> 00:46.000 This is a talk I've been wanting to give for a couple years now. 00:46.000 --> 00:48.000 There's a lot of frustration. 00:48.000 --> 00:53.000 I'm going to try to get through all of this in the time I have allotted, 00:53.000 --> 01:00.000 hopefully without intentionally hurting anyone's feelings, 01:00.000 --> 01:06.000 but there are a lot of kits out there that are designed by EE types who know how to solder 01:06.000 --> 01:08.000 and think, oh, this will be cool, or this will be cheap, 01:08.000 --> 01:11.000 and they throw something on a PCB and they send it to some people, 01:11.000 --> 01:20.000 and then somebody like me has to teach a bunch of people ranging from age six to it's not polite to ask. 01:20.000 --> 01:23.000 So having done that for a number of years, 01:23.000 --> 01:28.000 I have some feedback and some things for people to consider when they are designing these, 01:28.000 --> 01:33.000 because while I do sell these with my company Mr. Blinky Bling, 01:33.000 --> 01:35.000 we don't want to be the only people doing this. 01:35.000 --> 01:40.000 That's not our source of money. 01:40.000 --> 01:43.000 So who am I and why should you care? 01:43.000 --> 01:48.000 As he said, I've been teaching people to solder for over eight years every year at DerbyCon. 01:48.000 --> 01:51.000 I've had many events for the Level 1 Hacker Space in Louisville, Kentucky, 01:51.000 --> 01:54.000 which I am a member and volunteer at, 01:54.000 --> 02:01.000 and I've gone to B-sides, I've gone to a bunch of security conferences, 02:01.000 --> 02:07.000 I've been to libraries and other Maker Faires and other Maker events teaching everyone. 02:07.000 --> 02:11.000 I think my youngest is a four-and-a-half boy and girl, 02:11.000 --> 02:16.000 but that's honestly on the low end because hand-eye coordination and all that. 02:16.000 --> 02:19.000 Anyway, I have literally hundreds of successful students, 02:19.000 --> 02:25.000 including several people who have gone through soldering classes before and had a bad time, 02:25.000 --> 02:37.000 so that's why I feel like I'm entitled to talk about this. 02:37.000 --> 02:39.000 All right, so I apologize. 02:39.000 --> 02:41.000 I don't normally like to have word-heavy slides, 02:41.000 --> 02:46.000 but again, I'm trying to get all this in in as much in a half hour, 02:46.000 --> 02:49.000 and this is like a two-hour rant that I can go on. 02:49.000 --> 02:52.000 Ask Brad Loister's wandering around. 02:52.000 --> 02:54.000 He's one of the former presidents of Level 1, 02:54.000 --> 02:58.000 and he's not here because he's heard me rant about this before. 02:58.000 --> 03:01.000 He went to the other track. 03:01.000 --> 03:03.000 So when you're teaching new students, 03:03.000 --> 03:06.000 there are a number of mistakes that they're going to make. 03:06.000 --> 03:09.000 The most common ones involve too little or too much solder. 03:09.000 --> 03:12.000 Too little solder is really easy to solve and work around. 03:12.000 --> 03:15.000 Too much solder is harder to solve and work around, 03:15.000 --> 03:18.000 and there are some design tricks you can use. 03:18.000 --> 03:23.000 I will show a picture later on ways to get rid of bridges. 03:23.000 --> 03:27.000 I found a nice bridge picture there for that. 03:27.000 --> 03:33.000 Some parts are not really obvious in terms of orientation, 03:33.000 --> 03:39.000 and it's not just things like LEDs or transistors, but things like batteries. 03:39.000 --> 03:42.000 If you buy the wrong battery pack, 03:42.000 --> 03:46.000 it will have like a little plastic notch that you're supposed to line up, 03:46.000 --> 03:50.000 and I promise you, most of your students will not notice it, 03:50.000 --> 03:52.000 or a good chunk of them won't notice it. 03:52.000 --> 03:56.000 So if you buy something that can only go on the board in one direction, 03:56.000 --> 04:00.000 that simplifies the assembly process. 04:00.000 --> 04:04.000 They will remove the heat too soon or leave the heat on too long, 04:04.000 --> 04:07.000 and the heat on too long is one of the things I think a lot of people 04:07.000 --> 04:09.000 who are designing these kits don't think about, 04:09.000 --> 04:12.000 especially when they use tiny traces and tiny pads, 04:12.000 --> 04:15.000 because electrically, that's all you need. 04:15.000 --> 04:19.000 But if you have a 12-year-old who's holding the iron directly on the PCB 04:19.000 --> 04:22.000 for three minutes, they're going to burn that right off, 04:22.000 --> 04:26.000 and then I'm going to tell them, I'm sorry, you have to start over. 04:26.000 --> 04:32.000 So if you think about these common mistakes and the pitfalls that they can have, 04:32.000 --> 04:35.000 you can incorporate them into your PCB design 04:35.000 --> 04:38.000 in ways that are resilient against them, 04:38.000 --> 04:43.000 and that's what I'm going to go through on this talk. 04:47.000 --> 04:50.000 All right, so cheap kits, they're frequently very small 04:50.000 --> 04:54.000 because PCBs are expensive and small PCBs are cheaper, 04:54.000 --> 05:00.000 and a lot of these events are run by people who are more focused on the price 05:00.000 --> 05:03.000 than whether or not it's a quality kit, 05:03.000 --> 05:07.000 and I very much want to encourage people to fight that. 05:07.000 --> 05:11.000 If you're teaching soldering or if you're going to be doing something like this 05:11.000 --> 05:18.000 for an event and someone is pitching to you a $1.25 apiece kit, 05:18.000 --> 05:21.000 you might want to explain to them one of the reasons, 05:21.000 --> 05:24.000 why this is going to have a bad time day of event, 05:24.000 --> 05:27.000 and basically a small PCB, 05:27.000 --> 05:30.000 it's much easier for the student to burn themselves with it, 05:30.000 --> 05:32.000 it's much easier to push around the table, 05:32.000 --> 05:34.000 it's much harder to keep it stable. 05:34.000 --> 05:38.000 If you're going to use something like the unhelpful hands, 05:38.000 --> 05:41.000 which I have never used at any of my events, 05:41.000 --> 05:47.000 but if you're planning on that, those tiny PCBs are terrible for it, 05:47.000 --> 05:51.000 they're just miserable to work with, 05:51.000 --> 05:57.000 and beginners already think that soldering is harder than it is, 05:57.000 --> 06:01.000 it's one of those skills everyone thinks is difficult until they learn it, 06:01.000 --> 06:05.000 and they're like, oh, this is easy and kind of relaxing, yeah, yeah. 06:05.000 --> 06:07.000 So, yeah. 06:07.000 --> 06:10.000 Bad silkscreen, if you get the cheapest PCBs possible, 06:10.000 --> 06:13.000 sometimes the silkscreen is not on there very well 06:13.000 --> 06:17.000 or the directions are backwards on one notable kit, 06:17.000 --> 06:22.000 the positive and negative on the LED were backwards, 06:22.000 --> 06:24.000 that was not fun. 06:24.000 --> 06:27.000 Tiny pads are difficult for the students to line up on 06:27.000 --> 06:29.000 and you can burn them off the PCB. 06:29.000 --> 06:33.000 Tiny component holes, it may be the same size as the leg, 06:33.000 --> 06:37.000 but again, getting that in can take some effort, 06:37.000 --> 06:40.000 or you may have those cheaper LEDs 06:40.000 --> 06:44.000 that have the little square part in the middle of the leg, 06:44.000 --> 06:47.000 and you get down to that standoff and then the students bend or break it 06:47.000 --> 06:49.000 because they're trying to push that through. 06:49.000 --> 06:54.000 Slightly larger hole makes the part go through the PCB really easily 06:54.000 --> 06:58.000 and doesn't leak too much solder if you don't go too large. 06:58.000 --> 07:03.000 So it's just one of those things, if you make it easier to put the parts in, 07:03.000 --> 07:08.000 it makes the whole process easier and the students enjoy the class better. 07:08.000 --> 07:12.000 If you have awkward positioning of your parts, 07:12.000 --> 07:14.000 you can't get the iron in there, 07:14.000 --> 07:16.000 so something may look visually cool, 07:16.000 --> 07:18.000 but then everything is close together, 07:18.000 --> 07:22.000 it's hard to get the iron in there, and again, you're dealing with beginners. 07:22.000 --> 07:25.000 So I don't have a problem assembling that, 07:25.000 --> 07:32.000 but I can do 0201, not that I want to, but have done, 07:32.000 --> 07:38.000 and I do 042 more often than I like. 07:38.000 --> 07:42.000 This isn't for me, it's for someone who's never held a soldering iron before 07:42.000 --> 07:46.000 or may have held it once or twice, so keep that in mind. 07:46.000 --> 07:52.000 And then, of course, tiny traces I mentioned already and plastic components. 07:52.000 --> 07:57.000 People want to put power switches on, it's very tempting. 07:57.000 --> 08:01.000 I generally discourage it, we don't use them on our kits, if at all possible, 08:01.000 --> 08:05.000 and the reason for that is, again, students are going to hold the soldering iron there 08:05.000 --> 08:08.000 a long time and they're going to melt the inside of that part. 08:08.000 --> 08:12.000 It's happened many times. 08:12.000 --> 08:16.000 And then one of my biggest pet peeves is an unbalanced layout. 08:16.000 --> 08:21.000 That cheap kit you see that's the size of my pinky frequently, 08:21.000 --> 08:25.000 it usually has one LED, sometimes it's a flashing LED, 08:25.000 --> 08:29.000 sometimes it's a regular LED, and it's in the middle of that tiny strip of PCB, 08:29.000 --> 08:32.000 and when you put it on the table, because that's where it's going to be assembled, 08:32.000 --> 08:36.000 on a table, the student's pushing it all around the table because it just flops around. 08:36.000 --> 08:39.000 It's unbalanced. 08:39.000 --> 08:46.000 So these are some of the things that make beginning soldering kits miserable to deal with, 08:46.000 --> 08:49.000 even if you know what you're doing, and if you don't know what you're doing, 08:49.000 --> 08:51.000 it's 10 times harder. 08:51.000 --> 08:56.000 So what can we do to solve these problems? 08:56.000 --> 09:00.000 Okay, I'm doing all right. I'll try not to rush too much. 09:00.000 --> 09:05.000 I'm trying to get, as I said, a couple hours of ranting done pretty quickly. 09:05.000 --> 09:09.000 So tiny PCBs, they're cheap and they're easy to package and carry, 09:09.000 --> 09:14.000 and that is the only thing I can think that benefits. 09:14.000 --> 09:18.000 The entire board heats up. You can burn your fingers if you're holding it like this 09:18.000 --> 09:22.000 and you're soldering like that. You can burn your fingertips very easily, 09:22.000 --> 09:26.000 especially if you hold the iron on there a long time. 09:26.000 --> 09:29.000 They're honestly harder to use than you might think, 09:29.000 --> 09:32.000 especially if you don't know what you're doing. 09:32.000 --> 09:34.000 They get lost easily. 09:34.000 --> 09:37.000 You have to put your parts closer together because there's not much real estate, 09:37.000 --> 09:41.000 and then bridging becomes a problem, or assembly becomes a problem 09:41.000 --> 09:44.000 because your parts are too close together. 09:44.000 --> 09:49.000 And they're just, honestly, they're not as cool as some of the bigger projects. 09:49.000 --> 09:53.000 PCBs are not that expensive, and something a little bit larger 09:53.000 --> 09:56.000 that they can see, that they can show to people, 09:56.000 --> 10:00.000 it won't get lost in the bottom of a drawer, you know, it's cooler. 10:04.000 --> 10:08.000 So one of the solutions that we have done with our kits 10:08.000 --> 10:11.000 is we recognize that people learn in different ways. 10:11.000 --> 10:14.000 So if you look at the silkscreen for the LED, 10:14.000 --> 10:17.000 there are four different ways to figure out the orientation. 10:17.000 --> 10:20.000 We've got the positive and negative for the adults and teenagers 10:20.000 --> 10:23.000 if we're giving a class on E or, you know, electrical stuff 10:23.000 --> 10:26.000 and like what a diode is and how it behaves 10:26.000 --> 10:28.000 as a kind of turnstile for electricity 10:28.000 --> 10:34.000 and how we're using the fact that it emits light when it does that to build the kit. 10:34.000 --> 10:37.000 You can talk about all that if you're in the right age group, 10:37.000 --> 10:40.000 but if you're not in that age group, if you're doing an elementary school, 10:40.000 --> 10:42.000 then maybe you want a long and a short line 10:42.000 --> 10:44.000 because you have a long and a short leg. 10:44.000 --> 10:49.000 If you buy quality LEDs, you're going to have positive on long and negative on short. 10:49.000 --> 10:53.000 That's not always true, so test your components when you're ordering them. 10:53.000 --> 10:57.000 Make sure, you know, again, get some quality LEDs. 10:57.000 --> 11:01.000 And then we also have a round and a square pad, 11:01.000 --> 11:04.000 so that helps visual students. 11:04.000 --> 11:08.000 So you can say put the short leg, I think, in the square hole. 11:08.000 --> 11:10.000 That helps as well. 11:10.000 --> 11:14.000 Then there's the flat spot, and that is primarily for the instructor 11:14.000 --> 11:17.000 because you can line that flat spot up with the flat side of the LED 11:17.000 --> 11:20.000 while you're checking to make sure that it's incorrect 11:20.000 --> 11:22.000 before you let them solder it in, 11:22.000 --> 11:25.000 so you don't have to try to remove it and put it back in 11:25.000 --> 11:30.000 when they solder it in backwards because they will. 11:30.000 --> 11:34.000 And then, you know, try to remember that the people we're teaching 11:34.000 --> 11:39.000 don't have any of the insider industrial knowledge. 11:39.000 --> 11:41.000 They don't know the terms. 11:41.000 --> 11:46.000 They don't know a lot of the stuff that you may implicitly take for granted, 11:46.000 --> 11:52.000 so try to think about the best way to explain things 11:52.000 --> 11:55.000 and keep in mind that, you know, they really, you know, 11:55.000 --> 11:59.000 this is a very beginning-level process. 11:59.000 --> 12:01.000 They're not anywhere near an EE. 12:01.000 --> 12:06.000 They're just taking their baby steps. 12:06.000 --> 12:10.000 So as I mentioned earlier, the tiny pads, tiny holes, 12:10.000 --> 12:13.000 you can burn the tiny pads off the PCB real easily, 12:13.000 --> 12:15.000 and then the PCB's ruined. 12:15.000 --> 12:18.000 There's usually no way to fix that. 12:18.000 --> 12:22.000 It's harder to get the soldering iron in place. 12:22.000 --> 12:25.000 If you know what you're doing and you know exactly how you need to apply the heat 12:25.000 --> 12:28.000 and the solder, then a small pad's fine, 12:28.000 --> 12:30.000 but if you don't know what you're doing 12:30.000 --> 12:32.000 and it's your first time holding this thing 12:32.000 --> 12:35.000 and it's a little bit awkward in your hand and you're not comfortable, 12:35.000 --> 12:39.000 then using a little more space to be able to put the iron there 12:39.000 --> 12:44.000 on the pad next to the part is a big part of making it smoother 12:44.000 --> 12:46.000 and easier for the students. 12:46.000 --> 12:49.000 It also allows them to see the solder flow. 12:49.000 --> 12:55.000 So when they see how it moves, there's usually this aha moment, 12:55.000 --> 12:59.000 and then everything's easier for them. 12:59.000 --> 13:03.000 As you can see, we use long pads on the back of our kits. 13:03.000 --> 13:06.000 The pads discourage bridging, and they solve that earlier problem 13:06.000 --> 13:08.000 I mentioned where they put too much solder on. 13:08.000 --> 13:12.000 So they pull solder away from the center, and it is like magic. 13:12.000 --> 13:17.000 They also give the student plenty of opportunity to see how the solder moves 13:17.000 --> 13:23.000 and to get the iron in at whatever angle they feel comfortable. 13:23.000 --> 13:27.000 Once they see how it works and do it a couple of times, 13:27.000 --> 13:33.000 doing the smaller pads is no problem. 13:33.000 --> 13:37.000 So one of the things that I like to encourage you to think about 13:37.000 --> 13:40.000 is the thermal load rather than the electrical load, 13:40.000 --> 13:42.000 and I think this is in a later slide as well. 13:42.000 --> 13:47.000 But you want to think about what can be damaged by heat. 13:47.000 --> 13:51.000 Your students are going to leave the iron on too long. 13:51.000 --> 13:55.000 It's just they're going to be slow and cautious as they figure this out, 13:55.000 --> 13:58.000 and that's natural and it's normal and it's okay, 13:58.000 --> 14:00.000 and we need to encourage that. 14:00.000 --> 14:06.000 One of the ways we can encourage that is by making sure that they have access to 14:06.000 --> 14:09.000 – by making sure that none of the parts that are on there 14:09.000 --> 14:14.000 are going to be cooked by the heat. 14:14.000 --> 14:18.000 I mentioned extra obvious alignment hints. 14:18.000 --> 14:23.000 Again, you and I, we know how to read these schematics and silt screens, 14:23.000 --> 14:25.000 but they're coming to this brand new. 14:25.000 --> 14:29.000 So the more obvious you can make it and how things go, the better. 14:29.000 --> 14:32.000 Anything that's keyed for one-way assembly, like I mentioned before, 14:32.000 --> 14:34.000 that helps tremendously. 14:34.000 --> 14:38.000 And you want to avoid using the same footprint for multiple parts if you can. 14:38.000 --> 14:42.000 So if you have six different resistors on there, 14:42.000 --> 14:46.000 that's going to slow down the class because now you have to make sure 14:46.000 --> 14:49.000 that everyone's putting the correct resistor in the correct place. 14:49.000 --> 14:52.000 And remember, they don't know about the bands. 14:52.000 --> 14:56.000 They're not going to understand the difference or the effect 14:56.000 --> 14:58.000 that this is going to have on the circuit. 14:58.000 --> 15:02.000 So if you can skip that and avoid having that problem in the first place, 15:02.000 --> 15:04.000 please do so. 15:04.000 --> 15:08.000 It'll make my job a lot easier when I'm teaching them. 15:08.000 --> 15:13.000 And then, yeah, a low, unique part count reduces the overall class effort. 15:13.000 --> 15:18.000 So six LEDs of the same color, great idea. 15:18.000 --> 15:22.000 Six resistors of the same value, that's good. 15:22.000 --> 15:24.000 It's repetitive, it helps them. 15:24.000 --> 15:29.000 It's where you throw in the differences that it becomes a problem. 15:29.000 --> 15:33.000 So there's that picture I mentioned of that big trace. 15:33.000 --> 15:36.000 That trace is not electrically needed by any means 15:36.000 --> 15:39.000 for an LED running off of a CR2032 battery. 15:39.000 --> 15:41.000 It's just not. 15:41.000 --> 15:45.000 However, the thermal load is absolutely why that's there. 15:45.000 --> 15:48.000 I have never had a student burn that off a PCB, 15:48.000 --> 15:51.000 no matter how long they've left the iron on there. 15:51.000 --> 15:53.000 So try to think about that thermal load 15:53.000 --> 15:55.000 more than you think about the electrical load, 15:55.000 --> 15:58.000 because your students are going to heat stress the board 15:58.000 --> 16:02.000 in ways that you wouldn't when you're building the example 16:02.000 --> 16:05.000 or some of the students at the local university 16:05.000 --> 16:07.000 or wherever you have tested. 16:07.000 --> 16:09.000 They already kind of know what they're doing. 16:09.000 --> 16:16.000 So you need to think, what is a seven-year-old going to do to this? 16:16.000 --> 16:21.000 One of the solutions we use for unbalanced layouts, 16:21.000 --> 16:23.000 we like to have at least three LEDs. 16:23.000 --> 16:25.000 They're the first parts that go in. 16:25.000 --> 16:27.000 They're the parts that have that anti-bridging pad on it. 16:27.000 --> 16:29.000 We use regular pads on the other parts. 16:29.000 --> 16:32.000 And they form table legs. 16:32.000 --> 16:35.000 We have at least three on our smallest kit, three or four, 16:35.000 --> 16:37.000 and then on our larger kits, eight or nine 16:37.000 --> 16:39.000 or six around the outside. 16:39.000 --> 16:41.000 These form little table legs. 16:41.000 --> 16:43.000 They keep the PCB off the table. 16:43.000 --> 16:45.000 They form an air gap. 16:45.000 --> 16:46.000 The PCB is nice and level. 16:46.000 --> 16:48.000 It doesn't roll around on the table. 16:48.000 --> 16:50.000 You can heat it up as much as you want 16:50.000 --> 16:52.000 without damaging the table underneath. 16:52.000 --> 16:58.000 So you want to think about how you can design the kit 16:58.000 --> 17:00.000 easier on you as well. 17:00.000 --> 17:02.000 That's easier on you and easier on the facility 17:02.000 --> 17:05.000 when you're teaching soldering. 17:05.000 --> 17:08.000 You don't want this thing to be pushed around the table 17:08.000 --> 17:10.000 or tipsy or anything, 17:10.000 --> 17:12.000 because they're having a hard enough time 17:12.000 --> 17:15.000 holding that iron in the first place. 17:18.000 --> 17:21.000 Yeah, less is more for beginners. 17:21.000 --> 17:24.000 You're going to think of some really cool things you could do, 17:24.000 --> 17:26.000 save them for your advanced kits or your intermediary kits, 17:26.000 --> 17:28.000 for your beginner kits. 17:28.000 --> 17:31.000 A small number of parts is fine. 17:31.000 --> 17:36.000 We intentionally aim for as broad an age and gender range as we can, 17:36.000 --> 17:38.000 so we just go with bright-ass LEDs, 17:38.000 --> 17:40.000 because everyone loves them. 17:40.000 --> 17:43.000 You're like, who doesn't? 17:43.000 --> 17:45.000 So think of it that way, 17:45.000 --> 17:52.000 and then save the other ideas for your intermediary and advanced kits. 17:52.000 --> 17:57.000 Oh, we use cups on the table for the legs. 17:57.000 --> 18:00.000 So we have the students trim the leads. 18:00.000 --> 18:03.000 We have them hold one side and trim with the cutters 18:03.000 --> 18:06.000 so it doesn't go off into their eye or my beard. 18:06.000 --> 18:10.000 You can come up with your own humorous way of getting them to do that. 18:10.000 --> 18:12.000 But if you put a little cup on the table, 18:12.000 --> 18:14.000 they'll put their spare parts in there, 18:14.000 --> 18:18.000 and your table won't get near as messy as if you don't have that. 18:18.000 --> 18:20.000 So that's one of those nice-to-haves 18:20.000 --> 18:23.000 that I highly recommend for anyone who's teaching soldering. 18:25.000 --> 18:28.000 Yes, and soldering is... 18:28.000 --> 18:30.000 I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, 18:30.000 --> 18:32.000 but for anyone who's watching this on YouTube, 18:32.000 --> 18:35.000 soldering is fun and easy, and I want you to know how to do it. 18:37.000 --> 18:39.000 When I teach soldering, I start with the concept 18:39.000 --> 18:42.000 that soldering is not like other forms of sticking things together. 18:42.000 --> 18:45.000 It's not like tape or glue where a lot of pressure is your friend. 18:45.000 --> 18:47.000 You want to explain to them that using a lot of pressure 18:47.000 --> 18:49.000 with the soldering iron is counterproductive. 18:49.000 --> 18:51.000 They're going to have a bad time. 18:51.000 --> 18:53.000 You want to talk about heat and heat transfer 18:53.000 --> 18:55.000 and how the heat's doing work. 18:55.000 --> 18:57.000 A lot of people who know how to solder 18:57.000 --> 18:59.000 put all the solder on the iron 18:59.000 --> 19:01.000 and then try to put that on the wire or other part, 19:01.000 --> 19:03.000 and then it doesn't work, 19:03.000 --> 19:05.000 because the solder is very happy on that very hot iron 19:05.000 --> 19:08.000 and has no interest in being in that cold wire. 19:08.000 --> 19:10.000 You've got to heat that wire up, 19:10.000 --> 19:12.000 make the solder work to go across it, 19:12.000 --> 19:14.000 and get to that hot spot. 19:14.000 --> 19:17.000 And if you can convey that knowledge to your students, 19:17.000 --> 19:20.000 they're going to have a much better time when they're soldering. 19:21.000 --> 19:23.000 You want to teach them to heat it up, 19:23.000 --> 19:25.000 count to three, add the solder, 19:25.000 --> 19:27.000 remove the solder, 19:27.000 --> 19:29.000 and then count to one, 19:29.000 --> 19:31.000 and then remove the heat. 19:31.000 --> 19:33.000 When you get the hang of soldering, 19:33.000 --> 19:35.000 you don't necessarily need to do that, 19:35.000 --> 19:37.000 but for beginners, it's very important to go over that process 19:37.000 --> 19:40.000 so that they get the heat where it needs to be, 19:40.000 --> 19:43.000 and they get that nice shiny silver solder ball. 19:43.000 --> 19:45.000 It's fantastic. 19:47.000 --> 19:49.000 Oh, yeah, instruct these students 19:49.000 --> 19:51.000 to hold the ends of the leads 19:51.000 --> 19:53.000 so they don't go flying off. 19:53.000 --> 19:55.000 That's important. 19:55.000 --> 19:57.000 Humor is good. 19:57.000 --> 19:59.000 I use a lot of humor in my spiels 19:59.000 --> 20:02.000 when I'm doing this at various events, 20:02.000 --> 20:06.000 but be aware that the failure mode to humor is often jerk, 20:06.000 --> 20:09.000 so try to be cautious with how you do your humor 20:09.000 --> 20:12.000 so you don't inadvertently offend your students 20:12.000 --> 20:15.000 or make people feel like they're not welcome. 20:18.000 --> 20:21.000 Yeah, and focus more on the soldering itself 20:21.000 --> 20:23.000 than giving them a crash course in EE. 20:23.000 --> 20:25.000 There's only so much the student's going to be able 20:25.000 --> 20:27.000 to absorb in that lesson. 20:27.000 --> 20:29.000 You only have them for 15, 20 minutes or so. 20:29.000 --> 20:33.000 They don't need to know as much about, you know, 20:33.000 --> 20:35.000 how a resistor works. 20:35.000 --> 20:39.000 So, yeah, that's the short version of my rant. 20:39.000 --> 20:41.000 If you want to hear more about this, 20:41.000 --> 20:43.000 if you want more details, 20:43.000 --> 20:45.000 if you want me to go through some tips and tricks 20:45.000 --> 20:47.000 for teaching students, 20:47.000 --> 20:49.000 I'm happy to do so. 20:49.000 --> 20:51.000 I don't have alcohol, 20:51.000 --> 20:53.000 but I did bring some good Iva chocolate 20:53.000 --> 20:55.000 and some Rice Krispie treats, 20:55.000 --> 20:57.000 so if you want either of those, 20:57.000 --> 20:59.000 come get some from me. 20:59.000 --> 21:03.000 I am super friendly and happy to talk to you all, 21:03.000 --> 21:19.000 so just come up and say hi.